First of all, you could say this is from the horses mouth, since I screwed up my shoulder and the problem was largely down to benching wrong, and benching too much.The recommendation from your trusted Personal Trainer is to go down until your elbows are parallel to the floor. Any further and you’re at serious risk of ‘a shoulder injury’.
I’m not going to try and make sense of the recommendation. You can really frustrate yourself if you try and make sense of something that doesn’t make sense. Therefore, i’m going to explain the main reasons that benching causes so many problems, and get’s such a bad rap. You'll see that it can be any or all of a number of things, but for some reason, the range of motion gets the blame.

1. You need a balanced training program, if you train one movement too much, you neglect others. This developes into muscle imbalances which can cause problems, eventually. As a very general recommendation, you should be doing Row variations just as much, if not more, than you do bench variations. Strength and total number of reps performed for each will ideally be pretty similar.

2.Benching wrong. Most people bench wrong. They just plant themselves under the bar and lift without thinking about it. Get your shoulder blades down and back, and tight. This pops the chest up, and arcs the back. This decreases the required ROM to get down to the chest, without pushing for an extreme arc like a power lifter. If your shoulder blades aren’t tight then your shoulder joint get’s beat up. Don’t flare elbows out, tuck them, and bring the bar to lower chest. Also, benching with feet up is among some of the most stupid things I ever see, and I can’t believe some PT’s still teach this.

3.Poor internal rotator flexibility. In simple terms, the internal rotators are the muscles that 'round' your shoulders forward. They're made up lots of small muscles within the shoulder joint that you can't see, and other larger muscles, like the pecs and front delts, that you can see. If you have a hunchback posture then you more than likely have both tight internal rotators, AND poor upper back (shoulder blade) stability. This is one situation where you shouldn’t be benching full ROM. In fact, all you should really be doing is push ups, pec stretches, and flirting with the idea of some neutral grip DB bench presses, and probably on the floor. When you fix this problem, then you're good to bench full ROM.

One line I like to say is - The lifter is bad for the exercise, not the other way about.

I'm on a role with this thread. Everytime something like this comes up, i'm just going to vent it here.

Good post Pete, but one thing about the food pyramid. The new one they made with the stripes, is so non-comital to actual portions, it's immaterial.

Who's Pete? haha

'Zach', really my problem with the pyramid is the sources of calories that they recommend. For my height and weight 3 cups of milk, most of my calories would come from processed carbs, I should have 9 cups of starchy vegetables and only 3 cups of dark greens, healthy oils like olive oil would be classified as discretionary calories.

The pyramid recommends lots of grain. The government subsidizes grain. Heavily processed grain based foods can be sold at enormous profit where as whole foods have a slim profit margin. Then you have people eating all that and getting very fat. So other companies can make money trying to get them thin. Of course they can't get thin on what they eat so you can keep selling this useless crap to them again and again.

The problem with obesity is not caused by overeating, or eating known junk food. It is caused by eating what they are told to eat. It is caused by greed.

Ironman wrote:
The food pyramid recommends what it does for 1 reason. $$$$$$$ The pyramid recommends lots of grain.
End Quote

No doubt. That's been my problem with the old ones. I didn't see it pushing it that heavy this time out, but still heavier than it should be. Now I'm going to get on a soapbox on this. The major food mfr's in Battle Creek and elsewhere keep the markets flooded with processed grains, most of which aren't even whole grain anyway. There are totally misleading and idiotic ads on , especially in the morning hours with kids watching their cartoons on Saturdays, for these sugar-filled breakfast cerels. Why not just go out and buy them doughnuts?, because that's the sugar equivalency that they're getting. That one commercial about frosted wshredded wheat biscuits really boils me. Without the sugar, they might be alright every now and then, but pusing it like that, might as well put your kid in a box right now.
Tim

Heavily processed grain based foods can be sold at enormous profit where as whole foods have a slim profit margin.

Shelf life is a huge issue. The heavily processed foods last forever on a shelf where real food spoils in short order. That's why they can make so much money on the processed foods. Of course they have to remove everything of value from the food in order to make it shelf stable. Omega 3 is the most abundant fat in nature. It's what our body is designed to eat yet it's completely missing in processed foods. It's been systematically removed in order to increase shelf life.

I work out at a Gold's gym with some huge beasts. This gym is legendary for people using steroids. They are all perfectly nice. If anything bodybuilding might attract guys who are, skinny, short, or have body dysmorphia.

Steroids make you a little more aggressive and confident. So if someone is an a$$hole, they will not be hiding it as much. If you are getting on someones nerves, they are more likely to express that to you, but they are not going to kick your ass unless you were doing something that would have provoked that reaction anyway. So that is where the myth comes from.

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